Non-Market Strategies, Corporate Political Activity and Organizational Social Capital: The US Anti-Dumping and Countervailing Duty Process

Corporate political activity (CPA) can be an important element in any firm’s effort to gain competitive advantage. This has been particularly true in the area of international trade, where domestic producers seek to bar ordisadvantage foreign competitors in the home market though the imposition oftrade protection. In the United States the imposition of anti-dumping duties(AD) or countervailing duties (CVD) is among the most popular policy demandmade by firms, and as such is a focus of corporate political activity. Thispaper seeks to understand how and why some firms make more effective useof this process. It does so by drawing on social capital (SC) theory toilluminate the qualitative aspects of effective corporate political activity.Resilient trust between firms and their attorneys is revealed as a prominentaspect of effective CPA. The paper also adds to the literature by including foreign as well as US firms in the sample.